This year, we’re asking brands to restore $1 billion in advertising investment to support high-quality journalism, a fraction of the reduction in news media ad spending advertisers had in the 15 years before the pandemic. Since then, I’ve been pleased with the response from industry peers and experts to the multi-billion dollar challenge, but we still have a long way to go to get there.
Around the same time we launched the challenge at the annual Cannes Advertising Festival, the Association of National Advertisers revealed their Programmatic Transparency Research “First Look” (If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend you take some time to read it, especially if your title is Treasurer). One of its key findings is that advertising sites (MFA) dominate participants’ campaigns: the average participant sees 14% of their total programmatic investment go to MFA, and one in five impressions is delivered in these environments Therefore. This presents an opportunity for brands to instruct their agencies to block harmful MFAs from participating in their listing programs and use the savings to increase advertising investment in quality journalism.
Although MFA does not yet have a widely adopted standard definition, they share common characteristics: very high ad-to-content ratio, fast auto-refresh ad serving, high proportion of paid traffic sources, generic content (non-editorial content), low quality, sometimes faulty, occasionally plagiarized), and a templated website design designed to cram as many ads as possible onto the page.
Simply put, these sites provide a poor user experience and their only goal is to soak up as much advertiser money as possible in the programmatic marketplace. Many companies use sophisticated algorithms to determine which keywords advertisers are blocking for brand safety purposes, and then use artificial intelligence to write stories that avoid those words to improve their chances of winning an advertiser’s bid. The end result is that MFA regularly beats the best news sites in the programmatic market for brand safety reasons, when in fact they are more concerning from a brand suitability and user experience perspective.
Here’s the thing: Not a single participant in the study included a single MFA site on their approved media vendor list (commonly known in the advertising industry as the “include list”). Still, 14% of ad revenue goes directly to sites that advertisers don’t want to do business with and are unsuitable from a content quality and user experience perspective.
2022, stylized advertising investment The US figure is expected to be $127 billion, rising to $168 billion by 2024, according to Statista. If you predict the results of the ANA study, it suggests that MFA could potentially attract $17.8 billion in advertiser funding, even though the vast majority of advertisers are reluctant to see their ads on these sites because they don’t offer this type of business – Push What quality publishers do is engage in questionable business practices, spread misinformation, and create a poor consumer experience.
CEOs should ask themselves: What could be worse? It could be true that your business’s ad appears in a major publication next to some high-quality news that may cover a disturbing subject, or your ad appears next to low-quality content. In an environment where ads pop up everywhere, Yes, maybe not. Which investments of yours have had little impact on the business?
“Advertisers play a vital role in ensuring journalism remains a powerful voice of truth in our society. Truth provides the brand safety umbrella marketers need to ensure brand messages reach their target audience. Marketers’ commitment to quality journalism Support enabling their advertising investments to flow from non-productive MFA sites to productive platforms such as news sites and other brand-friendly environments. We must all step up to optimize media investments to enhance brand image and minimize brand safety and errors Messaging matters. Shifting advertising dollars away from MFA sites and into quality journalism platforms is one way to do that,” said ANA CEO Bob Liodice.
Marketers’ advertising investments are the lifeblood of American journalism, and journalism is the lifeblood of our democracy, society and economy. It is an ecosystem that allows many businesses to thrive to levels rarely achieved outside our country. Your company may be one of the direct beneficiaries of this positive dynamic.
We have lost sight of this important symbiotic relationship. As brand safety concerns arise and an increasingly polarized culture emerges, advertisers have given up on the tremendous commercial value of news advertising and their civic responsibility to nurture news organizations.
We need a different kind of leadership if we hope to energize newsrooms and ensure voters across the political spectrum are fully informed at this moment in our nation’s history.
Lou Paskalis is Chief Strategist at Ad Fontes Media.
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The views expressed in Fortune Star review articles represent solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the following views and beliefs: wealth.
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